The excuses people use for getting away without renting a cabin may not be rural, but they certainly are quaint. It seems to be almost impossible for most people to refuse frankly to rent a cabin, to admit outright that the cabin isn't suitable or that the price is too high. Most people seem to feel that they must offer some logical excuse to get away--and that then, once they have escaped, they needn't return. Typical excuses are that they "have to run to the other end of town a minute first, and will be right back" or that they'll "grab a bite at a restaurant and come back to sign up inside half an hour." After one trip to a Banning department store where I tried many little coats, all too expensive, on Donna, I found myself making excuses to the attentive salesgirl. "I'll go home and think about it," I said, "and I might come back and buy one." Of course, I knew perfectly well that I wasn't going to buy one of the coats at those prices. I tried to analyze my own reasoning in making the excuse, so I would understand what motivated the customers who fished up frantic excuses so that they could get away. They must feel guilty, I decided, for using so much of my time and courtesy without repaying me for it; they want to justify themselves in my sight, even if falsely and temporarily, by leaving me under the impression that my trouble will be repayed when they return from "the other end of town" or from "grabbing a bite in a restaurant." They'd be embarrassed if they knew how clearly I understood that they had no intention of returning--as embarrassed as I was when, after thinking it over, I realized that the clerk in the department store knew perfectly well that I had no intention of coming back after "going home to think about it," and that I was just easing myself out gracefully, trying to keep her from thinking I was the ungrateful wretch I actually felt myself to be. Banning, on the whole a sane and level-headed little town, isn't without its cult members and its intense haranguers about "vibrations." The vibrations were, no doubt, very strong in these dabblers in pseudo-metaphysics when the members of the Los Angeles Temple of Yahweh bought about nine hundred acres in the desert east of Banning, announcing that they would build there a settlement to be known as Yahweh Springs. Spokesmen for the sect revealed, for the edification of Banningites, that Los Angeles would be blown up by an atomic bomb in the near future, and members of the sect were taking advantage of their special knowledge to build a refuge in the desert.